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Re: Some questions about the port



Axel Beckert dixit:

>> About the topic "Why not a BSD libc?" he wrote:  "Adapting the libc to  
>> the kernel is way less work than patching thousands of packages to work  
>> with another libc, too."
>>
>> I wonder why that is so complicate.  As far as I know FreeBSD offers  
>> many of our packages, too.  So wouldn't it has been possible to take  
>> some of their patches?  Or do you just thought, it would be easier for  
>> Debian to patch the libc, instead of getting several thousand packages  
>> patched by their respectice maintainers?
>
>I think, it's just the last thing. I'm just not sure if this counts as
>much as it did years ago (2001/2002) when Debian GNU/FreeBSD failed
>and one of the reasons was the BSD libc to my knowledge.

Yes, but FreeBSD comes with a base system, whereas Debian comes
with a bunch of GNU packages. The FSF likes to do Vendor lock-in,
and you have a bazaar of developers not looking past the corner
of their own table. Furthermore, things such as the shared library
system work different between, for example, GNU (Linux, kFreeBSD,
Hurd), FreeBSD, Solaris, OpenBSD, MirBSD even has a subtly different
one... and things like dh_* and dpkg-* depend heavily on the interna
of those. This is but one example.

So, porting the Debian system to a different OS/kernel is really
only feasible using (e)glibc, as sad as that is.

bye,
//mirabilos
-- 
FWIW, I'm quite impressed with mksh interactively. I thought it was much
*much* more bare bones. But it turns out it beats the living hell out of
ksh93 in that respect. I'd even consider it for my daily use if I hadn't
wasted half my life on my zsh setup. :-) -- Frank Terbeck in #!/bin/mksh


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